1,827 Photos Later….

My first daily photo posted on Nov. 24, 2007
My first daily photo posted on Nov. 24, 2007
On November 24, 2007 I decided to post a photo to my website. It was an image I took of Tarawa Atoll, Kiribati out of the window as my plane was landing early in the morning.

The next day I posted another photo, as I did the day after that, the day after that and the day after that.

Saturday marked the 5th anniversary of my daily photo. It means that I’ve posted an image from my travels every day for half a decade, or 1,827 days in a row.

The process of posting a photo every day has been one of the better things I’ve done as it has forced me to improve my photography. Because I put an image out every day, that means I have to have average taking at least one decent photo a day. When I’m out shooting with my camera I am usually thinking of what will or will not be good enough to display in a daily photo.

It has also forced a consistency on me, which means I have to be thinking about my site daily. Being consistent is something which is extremely important to running a blog and one of the biggest areas I still need to improve in the non-daily photo aspects of what I do.

The selection of photos is pretty much a random process. The only thing I try to do is to not duplicate locations during a given 7-day period. This results in a diversity of images and ensures I’m not just posting the same photos from wherever I traveled last.

I try to shoot for posting an image around 6-7pm Central Time in the US. Sometimes I’ll have my assistant Amy post an image for me if I’m not available to post it. Occasionally (but not often enough) I will work ahead and schedule photos for several weeks in advance. This is something I need to do more often.

Originally I posted images that were 500 pixels wide. I eventually upped that to 600 pixels before settling on the current 1,000 pixel wide format. Each time I changed my format I went back and changed the size of every previous daily photo that I posted. I have found that the bigger the image, the better. 1,000 pixels seems to be the largest image I can get away with, yet still have it fit on the majority of browsers and not adversely effect download speed.

One thing I’ve found is that you can’t hit a home run every day. Some photos are going to get a much bigger impact than others. What I can do, however, is try to avoid striking out. If I regularly post 3 and 4-star images, with the occasional 5-star image, I’m happy.

When I posted that image 5-years ago I had no idea I’d still be doing this a half-decade later. I still enjoy doing it and hope to keep doing for another 5-years.